London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The reason House of Cards keeps on running — we’re now into Netflix’s third series of Frank Underwood’s diabolical deeds, a worthy heir to Francis Urquhart’s suave Westminster homicides — is that we like to believe politics is a sphere of control freaks who can end careers or defenestrate rivals with a phone call. Events present a different view.

They drink vintage wine at Glastonbury and host casual kitchen suppers — for today’s power elite, political differences matter far less than a shared commitment to sociability. Anne McElvoy anatomises the new smart sets

Not since Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth had their stand-off have two women representing such instinctively different allegiances and styles been on show in the clash of the new head of the BBC Trust, Rona Fairhead, and Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, rebranded as Parliament’s ducking stool.

In a riveting scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, the anti-hero, having become seriously rich from dubious deals, persuades his wife’s aunt (a luminously batty Joanna Lumley) to funnel money into murky Swiss bank accounts by hiding it under her clothes and sauntering through Zurich airport.

Act 1, Scene 1. A lonely Heldentenor resembling John Berry, the artistic director of English National Opera, pores over the annual financial statement. Scene 2: after a duel with the chairman, Martyn Rose, Rose leaves the stage with a soaring lament about mismanagement and wasted public money amounting (he claims) to some £10 million. The casts rally uncertainly around Berry.

Theresa May has many of the assets befitting the first serious female candidate for the Tory leadership since Margaret Thatcher. She is tough as old boots, disguised in fetching kitten heels. She has a classless, commonsensical manner — the nearest thing we have to Angela Merkel. If May is “on manoeuvres” to replace David Cameron in the event of a defeat or unstable election result, it is not without good reason.

One of the few feats I’ve not attempted while lugging a small baby around with me is playing in a Haydn trio before an exclusive audience in a private members’ club. This may be just as well, to judge by the experience of cellist Katherine Jenkinson, who was told by the Oriental Club that she would have to leave the building in the interval with her baby daughter to breastfeed in a car rather than sit in a corner doing what nature intended. The club cites bylaws about children — the last refuge of an institution on the pranger.

Previously in the Norovirus season: the first sign of the Noro-horror is a 5am visit from the child clutching an abdomen and declaring that school is out of the question. As a trainee Tiger mother, I insist that in the absence of firm evidence of sickness, an appointment with the education system must be kept and cite a Korean headmaster who moaned to me that his pupils turn up sweating and trembling with flu, but refuse to be sent home.